Short Stuff: Alligator Gar

went to jump in to cool down. And right as I was going to take a leap off the dock, I saw a very large, like a two and a half foot garfish kind of treacle towards the surface. And I I've seen him before out there occasionally, but it just scare the life out of me because it is a terrifying looking fish. If you don't know what a garfish looks like, just do a little uhm search and they have these long, very sharp toothed snouts and they are terrifying if you It looks like something that you

would find in a river in South America. And not the one that you would jump into a lake in Georgia. Right. And also, um, you travel back in time fifty million years too, because they definitely look prehistoric for sure. Oh absolutely uh. And this is specifically about the alligator gar. And this comes from our old friends at House Stuff Works in Michelle Konstantinovski. Great name, very nice, but the

alligator gar is super old, right, Yeah. They think they found fossils as old as a hundred million years old, not just fifty um. And they actually the reason that it's called an alligator gars because it has a long snout too, but rather than being pointed like most other gar, it's flattened, giving it kind of like a shovel like appearance or actually like an alligator snout. And the Latin name for it is attracto status spatula. And that's right, spatula.

It's the spatula fish is another way to put it. And it I mean it really does look like an alligator snout when you see a picture of these things. Yeah, they are huge. There um seven living species of of gar, and the alligator gar is the largest by far. Uh. The other way you can tell a diff is they have two rows of teeth alligator gar on the upper jaw instead of just the one row of teeth of

the regular gar. And I think their head is a bit wider, yeah, And I think normally there um something like about a hundred and sixty pounds too, maybe six ft long, which is enormous for a fish. Um. But they have been I guess found up to three fifty pounds and ten ft long, which is even more enormous. I think the record, at least in Texas is three

and two pounds. That was back in And the reason we bring up Texas because a YouTuber named hating More he's a conservationist, posted a video on his channel wildlife Um last May because he caught one of these things and it was eight ft long and probably about three hundred pounds. Did you watch that video? I did not. It is a very large fish and uh he likened it to um kind of hanging onto the end of

a car that's trying to roll down a driveway. I don't see how you bring in a fish like this that that's that heavy, But he knew what he was doing, and it's it's just enormous, man. It's I think at the end he had that. Uh you know, he obviously released it, but he was kind of um measuring it and showing it off for the camera, and this thing just like whipped around to sort of wriggle and just like just it's so strong. It just knocks this guy

over and then swims away. And he's like, well, you know, I guess I I was gonna let it go, but apparently that just happened now, right, Good for him for letting it go, or at least planning to. You know, Well, you do let them go because apparently they're not good for eating. Uh. They for a couple of reasons. They don't taste great. Uh. And they are covered with these uh it's almost like an armored scale. Uh. They're called annoid scales, and it's like that um sort of um

like an armor you would see on a dinosaur basically, right. Yeah, they're very dinosaur like. And yeah, and the the even if you can dress them or I should say clean them to eat, like the meat that you get off of, it's not going to be very good. And if you find any row or fish eggs in a guar, you want to leave those alone because they're toxic no matter what gar species you're dealing with. So yeah, not really

a delicacy in any way, shape or form. Should we take a break, I say, we take a break and then we'll come back and talk more about alligator car so um, chuck. I found out some pretty interesting stuff about them. That an alligator gar is a an opportunistic eater and it will eat basically anything. I saw that. They'll eat deer and raccoons if they get a chance.

They'll eat waterfowl, turtles, crabs, other fish. Um. But one of the ways that they catch some of these things, especially some of the harder to harder to catch ones, um, they play dead. They ambush their prey by playing debt. They'll float and make another fisher, a raccoon or something that's going to swim past, think that it's dead. Then all of a sudden it grabs it out of the

water and that thing is dead. And uh, they do eat all those things, and they have those huge alligator like mouths and teeth, so they're super scary, but apparently they're they're not gonna come after you. Um. I was just being a little, uh, a little baby boy the other day when I got scared and wouldn't jump in. If I would have jumped in, this thing would have scattered and gone far away. It wouldn't have said, you know,

human arm must eat. Uh. They're they're just not going to come after you, so you don't need to fear. I think there's never been on record a case of I'll get her guard attacking somebody, right right, Yeah, that's what I've seen as well. But I mean, I guess if you had seen a gar that was floating, you would have wanted to steer clear that one, because maybe it wasn't ambush your arm. You know, you said that

you saw him in your lake. I'm taking it that your No name lake is freshwater, right, I know it's a saltwater lake in the middle of Georgia. You never know. Uh, there's some saltiness in Georgia for sure. Uh. Yeah, it's it's freshwater. Uh. And they're they're only in North America, which is pretty surprising. Yeah, but they used to be Remember we said that their fossils have been data back to a hundred million years. They used to be found all over the place. But yeah, now they're only in

North America. There are freshwater species and they tend to like um, parts of like bodies of water with poor oxygen, so like um, say like maybe a cove where you'd launch a boat, um, or a backwater of a river that's kind of outside of the turbulence, or even swamps or bayous. And one reason they can survive in these kind of lower oxygen environments is they have an air bladder that not only helps them float, it also distributes

oxygen to their blood. Uh slowly but surely, so they don't have to take in that much oxygen because they can hold a bunch at once. Yeah. And I think it's I think they're in Central America too. I just want to put that on the record. So let's say the Americas, but not South America. Men, these these alligator are are really tough to pin down. I think North and Central America because I did seek something about Costa Rica, uh,

which is okay, So the America's okay. Um. So people just because you don't eat them, people still do fish for them, like this guy. I think they are sort of um. There are a lot of regulations in place because they are really slow to to reach the age where they can make little gar um. They spawn in very specialized areas, so they're very ripe for over fishing

and for you know, like shrinking of species. But um, for that reason, they're highly highly regulated and you're basically, at least in Florida and I think a lot of other places, you're only going to be given a permit to fish for these things if it's scientific research or you're working in like managing the species or something like that. I tittered earlier, by the way, I want to say, at an inappropriate time, but it was because you said they're ripe for over fishing, and I just thought of

a ripe car and that sounds so gross. They're scary looking. Uh. Early on though that, like you know, early earlier humans would fish for them and do all sorts of things that arm are like those armor like scales, those gonoid scales. They made jewelry out of them and tools and things like that because they're really tough. And I think they would use their their skin for products and the skin oil for different things. Yeah, who knows, what, do you

have anything else? I don't have anything else. I think we've talked alligator alligator car to death. Well, I guess the last thing we should mention is is that they um even though they do our opportunistic eaters. I think there used to be an idea that they would devastate other fish populations, and that's apparently not the case. Right, Yeah, that's right. So they were over fished because they were

considered a nuisance fish. So they were trying to protect the fish that they wanted by fishing the car alligator car out. But it turns out they were wrong. I do have one more thing. Okay, the name gar for these fishes comes from the Anglo Saxon word for spear.

That is good. And I've got one more thing. I cannot help but think of a gar fish without thinking of the great great documentary Vernon Florida, my favorite documentary of all time, but the great Errol Morris and uh, one of the characters, the guy that talks like this, He talks about swimming in the river and oh, you come u up on one of those garfish. You're a better lookout brother. Really. And I saw that movie in college, right,

I didn't know what a garfish was. And it it was many years later that I saw a guar and I was like, oh, I get it now, I gotta see that movie. It's just there's nothing like it. Yeah, uh, you got anything else? I think, Yeah, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well, that means everybody's short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a

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